Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen's Object Lesson: Frames of War

Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen. Object Lesson: Frames of War

There is a whole spectrum of art pieces made from confiscated items looted from high-traffic places like airplane security checkpoints. These projects examine the items that naturally accumulate in particular circumstances, foregrounding the material evidence of human interactions.

I was recently art gallery hopping in Portland when I came across a collaborative piece by Anna Gray and Rayn Wilson at PDX Contemporary in which items were presented by the artists as if they were found. The pieces on display were essentially object-collages rather than non-fictional, pseudo-forensic samples.

One way the collages can be interpreted is that they represent the material lifestyle of those who engage in war and/or violent behavior. Read this way, Frames of War might conjure up the image of  a soldier away from home and with a meager stash of ephemera, patriotic items, and pebbles and/ or ammunition s/he forgot s/he was keeping. Objects which are held dear intermingle with those consumed passingly, and in the collage, all are visible. This stash might also be the only trace of a life after the body is gone, the source of memory and the relic of remembrance.

On the other hand, the piece asks questions about the juxtaposition of objects, and the myths which objects both emanate and engender. 

In the context of war, what is the meaning we apply to handcuffs, or handguns, or maps, or illicit photos, when they are linked like forensic evidence to the war setting? Do the objects come off as less harmful or more so? Moreover, questions arise such as if it is the gun, or the soldier's hand responsible for violence.  

Another question I have is what do we do with the toothpaste in Object Lesson: Frames of War, or the bottles of Coca-Cola and shortcake in Object Lesson: Violence? Immediately I think back to Errol Morris' documentary on a Texas murder trial, The Thin Blue Line and the emphasis the film puts on the spilled contents of a police officer's malt milkshake as she stepped out of a police car to witness the murder of her partner. The presence of these kinds of objects encourages us to see that the unimaginable occurs in mundane and comfortable circumstances as well as in distant, dark ones. This makes violence seem more real, as if it could at any time penetrate into our day to day routines.  In the Object Lesson photos, we are prompted to think of how violence sprouts from individuals who initiate daily practices on the micro level that very much resemble our own.

To be truthful, I find the imposition of an archival grouping of objects which were not truly found  presumptuous, almost on the level of a prop artist assembling pieces for a show on a table. Nonetheless, Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen's work offers a unique experience which urges the examination of social myths surrounding objects and of the artifacts of violence and war.

Object Lesson: Violence

Object Lesson: The Administration of Fear

A Comic Writer's Take on Journalistic Truth

      

     I've recently been on a political, graphic novel kick and I've realized that there are a lot more of them than I ever imagined-- and a lot more specifically about conflicts in the Middle East. Most self-respecting liberals these days have most likely consumed the pages of the Persepolis comics but few have branched beyond that, or perhaps know the variety and the seriousness of the subjects that many of these comics try to tackle. 
       I just finished Joe Sacco's Palestine, winner of the 1994 American Book Award. In the novel, Sacco illustrates the raw material generated by a freelance reporter in his day-to-day work on the border regions of Pakistan, Israel, and Egypt. In the novel our protagonist, Joe Sacco himself, interviews individuals about their experiences with the occupation, the heavy violence, and with public institutions like jails, and the scant number of dilapidated and discriminatory hospitals and schools. 
       Joe Sacco's work has been featured in many reporting magazines and newspapers but he has battled public associations of the comic genre with fluff, camp, and pulp. After reading Waltz with Bashir, (see my last post) and Palestine, I feel especially touchy and defensive when it comes to this subject.  Sacco does a great job of describing the role of the comic journalist in his newest collection, Journalism (2012) from their need to be intensely observational and attuned to detail like a courtroom illustrator might be, to their qualifications as writers and interviewers, and courageous forces of nature, like other freelance journalists and wartime reporters. 

He writes: 

"      There will always exist when presenting journalism in the comics form, a tension between those things that can be verified, like a quote caught on tape, and those things that defy verification, such as a drawing purporting to represent a specific episode. Drawings are interpretive even when they are slavish renditions of photographs, which are generally perceived to capture a real moment literally. But there is nothing literal about a drawing. A cartoonist assembles elements deliberately and places them with intent on a page. There is none of the photographer’s luck at snapping a picture at precisely the right moment. A cartoonist “snaps” his drawings at any moment he or she chooses. It is this choosing that makes cartooning an inherently subjective medium.

            This does not let the cartoonist who aspires to journalism off the hook. The journalist’s standard obligations—to report accurately, to get quotes right, and to check claims—still pertain. But a comics journalist has obligations that go deeper than that. A writer can breezily describe a convoy of UN vehicles as ‘a convoy of UN vehicles’ and move on to the rest of the story. A comics journalist must draw a convoy of vehicles, and that raises a lot of questions. So, what do these vehicles look like? What do the uniforms of the UN personnel look like? What does the road look like? And what about the surrounding hills?

            Fortunately, there is no stylebook to tell the comics journalist how far he or she must go to get such details right. The cartoonist draws with the essential truth in mind, not the literal truth, and that allows for a wide variety of interpretations to accommodate a wide variety of drawing styles. No two cartoonists are going to draw a UN truck exactly the same way even if working from the same reference material.        "

Waltz With Bashir: Review/ Reccomendation

     

         There is something very Waking Life about Ari Folman and David Polonsky's film and subsequent graphic novel Waltz With Bashir (2008) about the massacres of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War. The Tel Aviv Israeli director-illustrator team use the comic form to explore how a soldier seeks to understand his responsibility in the massacre when his unit failed to intervene. As in Waking Life, Waltz With Bashir uses the exaggeration and glossing implicit in the illustrative form to mimic how imagination and representation shape and often compromise human memory and experience.

        The story is autobiographical and features Ari Folman, a 19-year old Israeli soldier and also as a middle-aged man looking back on his youth. It begins as Ari Sr. is jolted awake by a dream of rabid dogs invading a city- dogs just like those he shot in Lebanon to prevent the detection of his unit. After this vision Ari realizes that he had long ago suffered amnesia and lost his memory of the war. He then attempts to reconstruct the large holes in his memory by interviewing his long lost compatriots. 
       The narrative follows Ari as he seeks out his memory and re-discovers his moral culpability in the war. Perhaps this feature is why the story is compared to Vonnegut's dystopian teenage classic, Slaughterhouse 5, which follows a similar digression from flashbacks to the present. But over the course of most novels, the accumulation of details helps the reader become more familiar with how the characters see the world. This is not how Waltz With Bashir works. The reader can't really 'get' Bashir, because Bashir begins as an amnesiac and ends up rejecting the experience he went through which he discovered from those he interview. As it were, with each new discovery about himself, he puts off considering before having more information. 
        Folman's struggle works as a metaphor for the system of public memory-making; intensely broken, full of holes, but constantly wrangling for more images, and images that will affirm the need for more information before the story is complete...which might just be never. 
         In Waking Life and Waltz With Bashir the existential predilections of the protagonist are complimented by the comic form- which distorts the landscape, faces, and operative functions of humans as if to remark on our lack of observation and comprehension of our surroundings. In Waking Life, this effect precipitates a new-agey spiritualism that supports creative imagination and solidarity over the inability of our bodies to express the self.  In Waltz With Bashir the comic form rules a decisive color palate and a mixture of photorealistic illustrations of flames and nightclub lights. Folman's flashbacks mimic the views from military goggles, headlamps, and tank telescopes. In this way, his memory comes to him in the form of images which mimic technological lenses--- as if he will never know which are his memories, which are constructed by his compatriots, and which have a place in his head because of the national and mass media. The landscape is distorted, the body, and the mind, all distorted by the detachment of the telescopic gaze.
       Waltz With Bashir also implicates the problems of using interviews to reconstruct war memory. The content of Folman's interview with his fellow soldier Carmi in Holland hits upon this issue. Carmi bursts, "It's funny. Just before you showed up, my son Thomas went out to play with a plastic rifle. While he was playing he started asking questions: What did I do in the army, did I ever shoot anyone." "Did you?" "I don't know...With all the pressure and the fear we start shooting like maniacs, I have no idea at what." For one, it seems that the act of shooting into unknown space prevents an individual from knowing what they are individually responsible for and causes a skewing of memory and a projection of guilt onto all when the event is remembered. In this way, the question of what an individual is responsible for is almost too fraught to ask. No less, Carmi's statement also makes it clear that individual memories of war are skewed by expectations at home. Because it might pain his child to hear that daddy killed someone, or vice versa might make the kid unreasonably excited----- an ex-soldier might have to fudge his retelling of the story to make his service more digestible. 

          Ostensibly, Folman was a member of the Israel Defense Forces that assisted in the massacre unknowingly but failed to stop the killing of hundreds civilians once it was clear what was going on. Ari says in the narrative:

 "They were going in to purge the camps of Palestinian terrorists...And we were their cover...After that we'd take control...All night we heard shooting from the camps, and the sky was lit with flares...The next morning they started bringing out the civilians...A long row of people was led out of the camps by the phalangists...The command center was located behind us, about one hundred yards away, on top of a very tall building where they could look down and see everything. They probably had a better view than I did."

 Ari Folman's (Folman the director, and the protagonist, I suppose) intimate engagement with his own biography is nothing short of amazing. His mourning of lost memory is realistically coupled with a desire to keep trauma hidden and indiscreet. But in writing, producing a film, and printing comic versions of Waltz With Bashir, he further turns his memory into an interpretive commodity and a tool that can be used to both inform us about the Lebanon War and the massacre, and about the flaws in media memory making.

The Graphic Novel Cover

Massacre of Palestinians in Shatila, 1982

Edward Said on the US's Predilection for Israel

     
       I recently found out that the academic demi-god of many undergraduates, Edward Said is also a tour-de-force commentator on media-politics in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Said is most widely known for his book Orientalism (1978) which is foundational in post-colonial studies and explores how Western academic scholarship and the popular media have created a feedback institutional structure backing narratives of Western power and intellectual superiority over Africa, the Orient, and the Middle East since the 19th century. Though Said himself is a Palestinian American, his stance is not anti-Israeli. He argues that Palestine has been ill depicted because of the anti-Islamic, anti-Arab leanings of American foreign policy and the American news media---and he advocates for journalism about the Israel/ Palestine conflict that focuses on human experience and reckons with the future from the micro rather than the macro level.

        In a new hotblooded essay, Said asks readers to consider how the media canons in Israel and in the States are engaged in efforts to convince us to support Israeli Zionists with impunity over Palestinians. I highly advise that you read the article in completion because Said is keen on describing the ins and outs of various types of propaganda- whether guerrilla or mainstream, public or international. From the article: 

       Israel has already poured hundreds of millions of dollars into what in Hebrew is called hasbara, or information  for the outside world (hence, propaganda). This has included an entire range of efforts: lunches and free trips for influential journalists; seminars for Jewish university students who over a week in a secluded country estate can be primed to "defend" Israel on the campus; bombarding congressmen and -women with invitations and visits; pamphlets and, most important, money for election campaigns; directing (or, as the case requires, harassing) photographers and writers of the current Intifada into producing certain images and not others; lecture and concert tours by prominent Israelis; training commentators to make frequent references to the Holocaust and Israel's predicament today; many advertisements in the newspapers attacking Arabs and praising Israel.

Indeed, it doesn't take much to find a whole spread of these kinds of resources available on the internet. It also seems that Israeli papers have a tendency to feature op-eds critical of the portrayal of Israel and Israeli citizens in the New York Times. This one even goes so far as to say of the Times' article; "Does every American – in fact, every person in any democracy not follow and vote with their “personal, ideological and financial agenda?” Is the Times saying Adelson is not allowed to do that simply because he is a self-made billionaire? Isn’t that what every poor man seeks to become? A rich self-made man? Is that not the essence of greatness in America – putting one’s money where his mouth is?" Whoa.

      The above from Said's article also makes me consider the propagandist implications of the free Birthright trip to Israel that many of my Jewish friends have jumped on-- an opportunity that I might now blush to have so deeply envied. In fact, it turns out that Birthright trips have been criticized fairly widely for their propagandist nature and have even been implicated in protests of the Occupy movement. The Jewish newspaper Haaretz explains: 

      In a mission statement titled "Occupy the Occupiers: A Jewish Call to Action," the Young, Jewish, and Proud (YJP), described as the youth wing of the left-leaning Jewish Voice for Peace movement, called out to young Jews to "stand up to the 1% in our own community, the powerful institutions that support Israel’s corporate-backed military control of the Palestinian people and act as the gatekeepers for our community."

         And the work of the Jewish Voice for Peace movement is hardly the only Jewish organization in America advocating solidarity among Jews and Palestinians. Said also mentioned the efforts of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee to stop hate crimes against Arabs in the US following September 11th------ as well as well as their efforts to broaden perspectives on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the American education system. 

        I was led to Said's article when thinking about Israeli propaganda in the states because I recently read his excellent introduction to Joe Sacco's comic series Palestine. Sacco's method jives with Said's because both argue in favor of using media to expose scenarios that journalists would not be tasked or paid to write about. To this point the two advocate for an equalized exposure of Palestinian and Israeli perspectives, but also for a bottom-up approach which exposes the experiences of individuals suffering through the violence, and the refugee camps, and the lack of state control rather than recent  diplomatic events. 
        It is refreshing to see such an intellectual such as Said transverse the institution to write direct political commentary. In both aspects of his work he focuses on how governments censor news coverage and how stories are reported. And his writing provides education that disrupts the media and makes us climb back into the more sensible place of skepticism.

Laying Remains to Rest at the Sept. 11th Memorial

  The New York Times ran a good article this month on the dialogue surrounding 9/11 Museum's handling of the unidentified remains from the site of 9/11. What most interests me about this story is the close relationship of the public to the curation and design of the Museum's exhibitions and the type of place that this relationship creates. 

                                                                                          An excerpt from the Times: 

This work will be hard but imperative. Ideally, a consensus among the families can be reached. In its absence, the 9/11 museum could either devise a means to determine the majority of families’ viewpoint (majority rules) or offer a new solution that strives to address the widest array of concerns (multiplicity rules). But more than offering a quick fix, the mere process of dialogue will demonstrate respect and an acknowledgment that curators do not have exclusive power over the dead. The families should be given the chance to give consent — to exercise their rights as kin.

                           Of course it is imperative that the human remains find their proper resting place. But the collaborative curation in this case makes me also wonder about the handling of other types of war artifacts and the community's say in what museums do with their endowments. It seems that the closer the themes of art and public projects hit to home the more they must be shrouded in tenderness and collaborative communication. Moreover, the closer they are to home, the more those immediately affected by the historical events remembered are part of the creative process and the more claim they have to the monument.
                           I think this is perhaps what draws me most to museums created to recognize specific historical circumstances and tragedies even though many would rather look to conceptual and the avant-garde art. In monuments and memorials, it is known that the curation and design corresponds to an expressed human interest and to the memory of those influenced by the event rather than by a monarchical curatorial team thinking on the international scale or trying to outdo the latest trend. It is a necessary part of museums such as the 9/11 Memorial to be extremely intimate, but it is also something I think museums across the board could take a card from.

Sketching the State of American Vets

                     The body of a veteran represents the walking manifestation of war. In the German Weimar Republic, it was the breadth of WWI veterans with prosthetic limbs that inspired many artists of the likes of Otto Dix and others of the New Objectivity movement in the 1920s and 30s to depict the effects of technological change in warfare and society after the war. 
                    The Joe Bonham Project sponsors artists to depict the physicality of war through sketches and representations of the wounded in military hospital across the states. The project realizes the potential of representation to implant a kind of emotionality that photography struggles with because of it's implicit claim to truth. What is especially appealing is that these sketches represent communions between artists and veterans that took time, trust, and intimacy to create. These however, are not interviews and the exchange was not so much verbal as corporeal and I daresay even spiritual. Moreover though these drawing might fall into the portrait category they aim to depict more than the person of focus but a collected series of young individuals who are burdened with the corporeal weight of our political decisions. 
                Look for a comic book, a traveling exhibition, and future releases of images in the future. I'll be sure to post them online as I find. 

War Memories in Six Words

"He Still Wants to Go Back." 

                  "Gonna Rip That Uniform off Him."

   The talent of quickly summing up one's present attitude is the stuff of serious attention in our daily lives from twitter post to text to #hashtag. Ok. But what happens when this form of writing becomes the stuff of art and history-making? Can it be informative or does it produce more of the same head-scratching vaguery that hashtag inside-jokes written by out-of-touch friends across the country might produce?

                     Upstart Smith Magazine's Six Word Memoirs showcases this talent, boasting categories like 'Moms' along with more serious subjects such as 'Divorce' and gasp... even 'War' and featuring the good ones like it's a competition. The site apparently even deals with some official veterans organizations to push it's specific brand of wartime memory making.

(From the URL): "Smith Magazine is honored to team up with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) to hear stories about coming home from war- in exactly six words...

                     It is clear from the site that the majority of folks posting to this category are the loved ones of people serving overseas who are looking for solidarity. When someone writes, "Best words. 'Mom I'll be home," they are asking for sympathy from the nebulous number of people who might stumble across the post somewhere on the site. In this case your tag line is not just for subscribed 'friends' to read but for an unknown audience. This is 'fishing' for compliments in the vast pool of well, anyone. 

                    But there is something eerie about simplifying the complexity of the human psyche down to a tag line when we're talking about war. When writing in this style, we shoot for profundity, for revelation, for that which needs no elaboration. Or at least, we can pretend to do those things without doing them at all. It's like a game of darts where you try to nail down your emotions, but run out of darts real fast. 

                     This is probably the problem tackled by my friends who've abandoned their facebooks and is the reason why I cringe when I browse Six Word Memoirs. I don't know any Iraq/ Afghanistan vets personally, but it's hard to say I get anything from reading, "your letters are keeping me sane," or "Should I re-enlist? Told him yes." 

                                                         So why even go there?

                      I'm starting to think that when discourses on war get tossed into the internet melting pot, the projects that interest us fit into the molds already carved out by our preferences for different media platforms. As it goes, you will probably not log on to Six Word Memoirs unless you dig writing hashtags. And you will probably not try to understand the emotional effect the war is having on you in six words unless you really dig hashtags, or maybe want to shape up your hashtag writing or interpreting capabilities.